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One in a Billion
If you just go a little ways down Great Pine you'll find a place where people go not be judged, not to listen to others problems, just to let others hear their problems. Sometimes that guy will have to be me, or maybe a friendly customer will take the time to look up from his half empty, sorry, I mean, half full glass of whatever to share a story. There was no talking when sharing a story with another person in this bar, it took three seconds to look up and their face had already told the story. I tried to pick out the one who had it the worst or the one who had it the best. It was a game I liked to play to pass the time. The job isn just about giving people drinks now. In a bar like this where the seats and tables are made of wood and the barstools are torn and worn there was no fancy drink that people liked to drink. There was no special presentation anyone wanted to see. No one cared if I could juggle a motorcycle while jumping on one leg while singing lullabies.
People just wanted a beer, or maybe a shot. It was a place to sit and think about the day and what had happened. It was a place where you sit down and rewind, thinking about where it all went wrong. Maybe it was the time you started to look at other women, or maybe it was when you gave your boss the finger behind his back and someone told him about it. That was all you could do in a bar like this was sit and think about where it all went wrong.
"Beer please." This voice woke me from my daze. For a moment the scenery blurred in and out as I looked to see where the request had came from. I looked to the back of the room and saw that the boys in the back hadn’t ordered. The boys who played poker so far in the back that they only became visible when they lit their cigarettes never ordered anything. It couldn’t have been the boys playing pool; they were just as bad as the poker kids were. They had only took time to look up from the constant clanging of the pool balls to the make a snappy order and this order was much too formal. The girls in the center of the room had voices too angelic to match the dark and mysterious voice that came from this order, and god forbid they take time to say please when they e putting make up on. I looked to the bar and saw the man with the odd smile on his face. I picked at his smile while he sat there waiting for his beer. I couldn’t find anything; his smile was empty and impossible to read. It was like a book with black pages. He had no story he had no problems. There was no need for him to be in a bar like this, he was one of those people that belonged in those bars where everything was lights and glitter. Where empty celebrities watched as bottles spun and their colorful drinks got poured from six inches above the glass. At the same though I felt he did belong, he came in like the casual customer and yet something made him irregular.
"Yes sir". I peered at him through the corner of my eye as I poured his beer and waited for that smile to fade away. I waited for him to break apart and pour his soul onto the bar and into his empty glass. As I handed him his beer I thought that he might never stop smiling. His smile was hard to look at, and it made you shiver. This smile would not go away and it was close to driving me up a wall. I wanted to take a hammer and smash in his face just to see what thoughts would pour out of his broken head. I had been so use to being able to pick apart people minds that when I met a challenge it infuriated me that I could not.
"You win the lottery or somethin?" The man looked at me still with a smile and he shook his head, no. He started to sip from his glass and I took notice of how old this man was. His white hair and wrinkled skin led me to believe that this man was at least eighty. Yet that smile was so young and didn’t hold the same emotion an old man would have held in his smile. This man looked like an infant, oblivious and unaware that he had been living for so long.
As I continued to stare at the man he finally let something slip through the steel smile.
"May I help you?" He seemed a bit worried and upset by my consistent staring.
"Sorry." I turned back to the people in the bar looking for someone that could relieve the pressure this man put on my mind. As I picked through the faces in the crowd I felt no better. No matter how many times I could tell if a guy had lied to his wife it didn’t help me with this man infront of me.
"You seem to do more looking the bartending." I put the man's voice aside for only a few moments before I talked to him. It wasn’t that I was trying to be rude, it was just I wanted to make him wait maybe so he would be annoyed like I was, ell not much else to do. I don like to drink on the job, and I ain got a television in here so I forced to look. The man laughed a bit and faded away in his smile as he sipped his drink again and again. His face was too far in his own glass for him to notice the outside world, and maybe this was why he held such an infant like smile. Maybe his entire life had been spended nose deep in a glass of beer to avoid the pain of loss.
As the people started to pour out near the end of the day I looked and noticed the man still sipping the same beer. losing time. The man looked up for a moment to give me a last glance at his smile and stood up.
"Well sorry to not have noticed. I guess I wasn’t paying attention to the time." I surprised with all that looking around you do you can too. ell I have a watch to do all the time keeping. The old man stood and after all the senseless sipping he tilted his head back and let the beer slide down his throat like a river.
"Well good day." The man had said through that smile, that empty smile that no matter what I did I could not get through. "See you tomorrow.
Sure enough the next day he was back. His smile unchanged, and his appearance the same. His clothes had gone unchanging and for some reason I took notice to a crease in his jacket that I swear was the same way yesterday.
"Beer please." I knew I slammed the mug down pretty hard when I heard the thunder clap of the glass meeting the bar. "Calm down Rusty." Even though my name was not Rusty I liked the ring of it
"Rusty?" He looked up and shrugged in a sort of childish way.
"J ust a nickname I guess. Something I can call my own." This old man had taken up so much of my time the past two days that he became my main focus. I soon cared less about the boys playing poker, or the guys playing pool, or even the always-attractive ladies powdering their noses all day. It was a dance that would not stop and always stayed the same.
I soon forgot about the rest of the world as I stood there and day after day watching this man come in here and sip his beer until the end of the day. He never gained the concept of time because every day I would have to tell him that it was time to leave. For some reason I took an odd liking to the name Rusty, not the liking for a best friend or your favorite hobby, but a liking that grew on you over time. I hadn’t realized at the time, but the little amount of attention I paid to my customers nearly drove them away. Instead of the boys in the back always playing poker from five till closing, they only stopped in every now and then to see if I would pay any attention to them. The boys who play pool barely ever showed up now that they found more care at pool halls with complete stranger with a common interest. The ladies were nowhere to be seen anymore now that they didn’t have the focus of every single man on them at all times. It was just me and that mans smile now.
He would not speak yet he came in here every day for the simple reason to toy with me and watch me squirm as I tried to find the secret behind his smile. There was a golden treasure behind his lips yet they were locked tight. During the second month of this I started to make up stories that were so farfetched that the idea made me laugh at the end of the day.
One day I got so desperate I thought he was a murderer. He had just killed his wife and he hid her body so well the police never found her. He got the big life insurance policy in just in time and now he so rich he doesn’t know what to do with all the money. So he wants to see how long it will take for him to go broke on buying one beer a day. He then killed his wife mother who had conveniently put everything in his name the day before she died. The thought entertained me day after day and gave me something to think of like where he hid the bodies and how he had killed them. Maybe he cut them up with a table saw or maybe beat them to death with a hammer. Maybe shoved them both into the stove and fed them to the animals of the woods the next day. It was fun, and at the same moment the more he made up stories the more angry he got when the story ended. The more crazy the story was the more he was remembered of that smile of his that let nothing in or out.
"Good day Rusty. I’ll have the regular." The old man sat down again in the same place he always did. He acted in ways that were so obsessive compulsive it made me wonder if this old man was just cursed by some disease.
"Good day. You mind if I call you somethin?" The old man took his beer and sipped it.
"Yes I do."I stepped back and took a look at this mans face again and tried my best to find what this man was hiding and still I got nothing.
"Why do you like this bar so much?" The old man took little time away from constantly sipping his beer to look at me.
"This is the center of all human healing points. This is where every human alive at one point will go to solve their problems. Most likely not forever, but for just long enough to get a smile across their face If you could tell me where I can find the entire cycle of healing the human heart in one place please direct me there." I stood stunned for a moment and said exactly what came up in my head.
"Nowhere. The man now standing on his feet patted me on the back and smiled.
"Exactly! So why travel the Earth when I can come sit down here everyday. You put pictures of the Grand Canyon and the Eiffel Tower up and you can have the entire world in this one bar. Do you understand what I am saying?"
"Yeah." I don’t know who this man was, but I knew what that smile was on his face. It was the smile that was on my face right now. It was the same smile we shared and for the reasons that made us have something in common. This man was the one in a billion who don smile for themselves, but smile for others. The one in a billion that always listened without ever being heard. The one in a billion that had cared for others so much more then themselves they had never took the time to frown at what went wrong in their lives. All they could do was smile for what went right in others. This old man and me sat and stared at each other for a long while before I said, "You are one in a billion." The old man laughed and looked at me.
"No you are."I broke through this mans smile and I figured out what the treasure was. I figured out why the smile was so empty and why the man had always come back here day after day. I figured out why I came here day after day and it was because of the same reason. It was because we were one in a billion.
"So what's your name?"The old man looked up and his smile changed to that of a person who was ready to talk, who had after so many years finally found someone else who would just sit down and listen.
"My name is Henry. I have a wife and six wonderful grand children." He had finally had someone to listen to him, and that person was me.
So that what I did, I listened.
Last edited by penguinsfly03 : 07-06-2007 at 02:50 AM.
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